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NASA Found The Original Tapes of the Moon Landing!


mjah

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Remember when NASA couldn't find the original reels of footage from the Apollo 11 landing?

Well, they found them.

The original blurry, artifact-y video from the Moon was due in no small part to the way they were transmitted, with some particularly kludgy work done here on Earth to get them broadcast to a waiting world. The video data from the Moon actually looked quite a bit better than what we have seen to date.

The original tapes, finally uncovered, will be officially unveiled by NASA at the Newseum.

Obligatory: Conspiracy theorists will be undeterred by a moderate improvement in video quality.

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That's cool.......

I just bought my house from a Scientist that was at the Apollo Launch, he was a NASA employee his most of his life. He's about 80 Years old now, and I can't wait to tell him the news.

Mr. F has a Picture of himself in the Control room, along with the ID badge mounted on his wall from the launch-talk about cool!

BTW - TELL HIM that **** was staged.......

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That's a place where you want things to remain unfound. I'm thinking if I have the only original copy of the first recorded moon landing, I might place it somewhere secure and alone, not in a giant room full of crap no one is supposed to open.

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I'm no conspiracy theorist but how do you lose the only "original" taping of what was such a historic event?

There was a thread here a few days or weeks ago talking about how the archives have been getting ransacked by people and many important historic items are missing. I don't think the government is very good at keeping up with this stuff.

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I'm no conspiracy theorist, but did anybody else notice the wavy mosquito looking thing right near the end when Armstrong is approaching the camera again.

I've watched it twice...very strange.

Space mosquito.

I have to say though, its amazing there aren't more people claiming that tape doesn't prove ****. Where's the sun in that picture? Couldn't they have turned the camera around and pointed it at the damn Earth or something... give me some ****ing perspective!

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The "they found them" link. The thing appears out of nowhere, and makes a couple of loops, then dissapears at the end. It could just be a blemish on the tape or something, but it does look like a bug or something. lol
If you look a few seconds before that, if you look really close...you can see what looks like it appearing on the left, and blinking a few times in different spots before it reappears. :paranoid:

:laugh:

You do realize that that video is a 16mm camera pointing at an image on a black and white TV screen?
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Space mosquito.

:laugh:

I have to say though, its amazing there aren't more people claiming that tape doesn't prove ****. Where's the sun in that picture? Couldn't they have turned the camera around and pointed it at the damn Earth or something... give me some ****ing perspective!

Very true. They get an F- for cinematography. :) I guess just the sight of the man standing on the moon was supposed to be enough for 1969 audiences, lol.

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OK, now I'm confused. How does the story in the OP gibe with the news articles that came out yesterday and today saying that NASA is now acknowledging that the tapes were erased? Are we talking about two different things here?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090716/ap_on_sc/us_sci_moon_video

NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it

AFP By Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – Thu Jul 16, 7:11 pm ET

WASHINGTON – NASA could put a man on the moon but didn't have the sense to keep the original video of the live TV transmission.

In an embarrassing acknowledgment, the space agency said Thursday that it must have erased the Apollo 11 moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the videotape.

But now Hollywood is coming to the rescue.

The studio wizards who restored "Casablanca" are digitally sharpening and cleaning up the ghostly, grainy footage of the moon landing, making it even better than what TV viewers saw on July 20, 1969. They are doing it by working from four copies that NASA scrounged from around the world.

"There's nothing being created; there's nothing being manufactured," said NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who is in charge of the project. "You can now see the detail that's coming out."

The first batch of restored footage was released just in time for the 40th anniversary of the "one giant leap for mankind," and some of the details seem new because of their sharpness. Originally, astronaut Neil Armstrong's face visor was too fuzzy to be seen clearly. The upgraded video of Earth's first moonwalker shows the visor and a reflection in it.

The $230,000 refurbishing effort is only three weeks into a monthslong project, and only 40 percent of the work has been done. But it does show improvements in four snippets: Armstrong walking down the ladder; Buzz Aldrin following him; the two astronauts reading a plaque they left on the moon; and the planting of the flag on the lunar surface.

Nafzger said a huge search that began three years ago for the old moon tapes led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. His report on that will come out in a few weeks.

The original videos beamed to Earth were stored on giant reels of tape that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with other data from the moon. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

How did NASA end up looking like a bumbling husband taping over his wedding video with the Super Bowl?

Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.

Outside historians were aghast.

"It's surprising to me that NASA didn't have the common sense to save perhaps the most important historical footage of the 20th century," said Rice University historian and author Douglas Brinkley. He noted that NASA saved all sorts of data and artifacts from Apollo 11, and it is "mind-boggling that the tapes just disappeared."

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This just doesn't look good for NASA. First they lose the tape. Then they find it. Then they say someone erased it? How could you let that happen? This was history and you let someone tape of the first moon landing???? I'm sure the conspiracy theorists are having fun with this one.

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Considering everything else they had to do with pinpoint precision and perfection, the fact that they made one mistake is not too hard to believe. It's just shame that it was the film.

I'm sure it probably was really the furthest thing from anyone's mind while that was happening.

~Bang

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Again, can someone explain the discrepancy between the OP - which says they finally found the tapes - and the articles from today saying the tapes were erased? There is no way they finally found the tapes after a decades long search, only to accidently erase them before the unveiling at the Neweum.

Is the article in the original post (from Britain's Daily Express) bogus?

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